employees

Meta employees have not known for weeks if they are going to be fired. Meanwhile, the company records everything they do on the computer

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Meta is one of the companies that is betting the most on AI. Zuckerberg’s company is investing massively in the development of new data centers and critical AI technologies. And in the midst of this transformation, your employees find themselves vulnerable to mass layoffs, surveillance, and pressure to embrace the technology that could replace them. What exactly is happening. Meta has told its employees in the United States that it will record what they type on their keyboard, how they move their mouse, where they click, and what appears on their screen. The tool, internally called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), runs in the background on corporate computers and also takes periodic screenshots, according to counted Reuters, which had access to the internal memos. The company’s stated objective is to train its AI models so that they learn to perform everyday tasks on a computer in the same way that their employees do. Reaction. When the company announced the measure, hundreds of workers responded on internal channels, mainly asking how they could disable tracking. Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer at Meta, affirms That option does not exist on business laptops. However, that has not calmed the reaction of its employees. And it is that according to account In the New York Times, one employee even wrote to him directly: “Your insensitivity to the concerns of your own workers is troubling.” And all while they don’t know if they are going to be fired. Two days after announcing the tracking system, Meta confirmed which will lay off approximately 8,000 people on May 20, which represents around 10% of its global workforce. According to NYTwho spoke with several of his employees, many workers have been in a state of uncertainty for weeks. Some admit to being looking for work elsewhere. Others directly try to give signals that they want to be included in the layoffs to collect compensation. “It’s tremendously demoralizing,” wrote one of the users in an internal message to which the media had access. What Meta says. The company insists that the data collected is not used to evaluate employee performance or for any purpose other than training AI models. “If we are building agents to help people complete everyday tasks on computers, our models need real examples of how people use them,” explained a company spokesperson told the BBC. Meta also states that there are safeguards to protect sensitive content, although without specifying which ones. What employees say. The story is different from within. A worker who preferred not to be identified described the situation is described as “very dystopian”: knowing that every small action you perform on the computer is being recorded, just when the company is announcing layoffs, generates a feeling that is difficult to ignore. Another former employee said that it is “the last way they shove AI down your throat.” Legislation. In the United States there is no federal law that limits this type of workplace surveillance, as long as employees are informed of it, according to explained told Reuters Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Yale University. The situation is radically different in Europe, since Valerio De Stefano, a professor at the University of York specialized in labor law and technology, counted to the same means that this practice would probably violate the General Data Protection Regulation European. In countries like Italy, tracking productivity through electronic means is outright prohibited; In Germany, courts only allow keystroke recording in exceptional circumstances, such as suspicion of a serious crime. In Spain it would also be a very difficult measure to justify, and would directly clash with the RGPD. AI, at the center of everything. Beyond monitoring, Meta has been reorganizing its internal structure around artificial intelligence for months. It has organized mandatory training weeks for employees to learn how to use AI agents, introduced internal dashboards that measure consumption of tokens (the minimum unit of AI that measures its consumption) to foster competition between workers, and is creating a new generic professional profile called AI builder that replaces more specialized roles. And now what. May 20 is the date proposed by Meta to announce another wave of mass layoffs. Until then, thousands of the company’s employees live with the uncertainty of whether they will remain with the company, while also tracking their activity. Meta’s CFO, Susan Li, admitted during a call with investors that the company “really doesn’t know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future.” A phrase that is probably not reassuring for those who expect news on May 20. Cover image | Compagnons and Goal In Xataka | The Musk-Altman trial is giving the spectacle it promised: a soap opera of dirty laundry in which no one comes out well

To no one’s surprise, companies that lay off employees for AI are not seeing the benefits they expected.

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We have been hearing for years that artificial intelligence was going to transform the labor market as we know it. Apparently, companies that bet heavily on automation would gain productivity, save costs and leave the competition behind. And yes, many technology companies they have taken that path: dismiss employees to finance your leap into AI. A new report from the consulting firm Gartner has just poured cold water on that strategy. The research, based on surveys of managers of large organizations with income exceeding $1 billion annually, reveals that staff cuts They are not producing the economic benefits that many expected. The most striking thing is that the figures are practically the same among the companies that They fire and those who don’t. Gartner numbers. The consulting firm found that around 80% of large companies that are implementing autonomous AI technologies have reduced their workforce to a greater or lesser extent. As and as highlighted Fortunethese personnel cuts in some cases affected up to 20% of employees. However, when analysts looked at who was obtaining better economic results, the data indicated that there was no appreciable difference in the return on investment of those companies that had laid off a good part of their workers and those that had kept them on staff. As Helen Poitevin, distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner, noted, “There is no connection or correlation between those achieving ROI and layoffs.” The substitution fallacy. According to the authors of the report, the logic that has dictated the strategy of many technology companies is that, if AI can do the work that was previously done by a human, dispensing with that human will reduce costs, and that savings automatically becomes profit. The problem is that this equation is not being fulfilled. Gartner notes that companies that opted for workforce cuts to use AI ended up at the same point as those that did not. Poitevin warned that this approach could be “very damaging in a broader sense,” noting that some organizations that cut staff were forced to rehire employees shortly after. Amplify people, not replace them. Gartner data revealed that the companies that are achieving the best results are those that They don’t use AI to replace peoplebut rather they incorporate AI into production processes so that their employees perform more. In fact, one of the risks posed by the strategy of replacing personnel with AI is that the company stops investing in the medium term in improving its operations and loses productive capacity. The report notes that companies that use AI as a co-pilot for their workers tend to invest in training programs, create new roles to oversee the implementation of AI and redesign workflows, making their employees increasingly autonomous and productive. The future of work: transformation, not apocalypse. Gartner projects that by 2029 the number of jobs created thanks to AI will exceed those lost, thus coinciding with other previous analyzes such as that of the World Economic Fundwhich point towards a shift in labor profiles, not towards a balance of net job destruction. Between 2023 and 2029, approximately 6 million jobs will be automated worldwide, a small proportion of the nearly 2 billion jobs available globally. Still, the impact of AI is real. Gartner estimates that about 32 million workers a year will see their jobs automated. The author of the report assured that AI “is not causing a workplace apocalypse, but it is unleashing chaos and changing the way people work.” In Xataka |“They blame AI for layoffs they would do anyway”: Sam Altman confirms that AI has been used as an excuse to lay off Image | Unsplash (Raj Rana)

some Amazon employees use AI just to inflate their token metrics

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He tokenmaxxing now has its most documented case. Some Amazon employees have been using MeshClaw for weeksan internal AI agent tool, to automate unnecessary tasks and thus inflate your consumption of tokens in the internal markers that the company has implemented. This is not the first time something like this has happened in Silicon Valley: Meta had its own leaderboard tokenswith a winner who took the title of Legend Token. And similar patterns have been documented at Microsoft. But the Amazon case adds a detail that makes it more striking: the tool used to cheat is the same one that Amazon has officially deployed to make its engineers work better. Why is it important. Amazon requires more than 80% of its developers to use AI tools each week and measures compliance using data consumption markers. LLMs. The company has said those statistics will not be used in performance reviews. Several employees have responded with variations of the same phrase: managers are looking at it. “When you track usage, you create perverse incentives and there are people who are very competitive with this,” one of them told the Financial Times. Yes, but. There is a more generous reading. Forcing a large organization to come into contact with new tools has a certain logic: if you force enough people to use them, someone eventually finds a really useful use for them. The problem is that that only works if there is real exploration. An employee who delegates to an agent the task of summarizing emails that no one will read is not learning anything, he is just inflating his metrics. The big question. amazon has committed 200 billion in AI infrastructure whose demand, in theory, is absorbed as it is deployed. If a part of that internal consumption is tokenmaxxing Purely, the figures that justify these requests are less reliable than they seem. The distinction between real adoption and inflated consumption matters because the former generates lasting demand while the latter disappears as soon as incentives change. Amazon has already restricted public access to device usage statistics. When the marker is no longer visible, the behavior it encouraged also changes. Go deeper. The Goodhart’s law He has been explaining this for fifty years: when a measure becomes an objective, it is no longer a good measure. Amazon hasn’t built a system to know if its engineers are using AI well. You have built a scoreboard, and the scoreboards are played. In Xataka | If the question is whether using ChatGPT or Claude in English is more efficient and saves tokens, the answer is: yes Featured image | Xataka

OpenAI employees who sold their shares

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In October of last year, OpenAI closed a secondary share sale which raised its valuation to 500,000 million dollars (Today it is already worth 852,000 million). This allowed employees to sell their shares, becoming multimillionaires even before the IPO. 6.6 billion. It is the total amount of the operation in which more than 600 employees, both current and former employees, benefited. In previous similar operations, OpenAI limited the maximum per person to 10 million, but in this case, due to high demand from investors, they decided to triple it to 30 million. Of all of them, 75 employees reached the maximum number, becoming multimillionaires in one fell swoop. The AI ​​winners. Uncertainty about the future profitability of AI continues to loom large, but that is not affecting workers in the most important AI laboratories. The case of the secondary sale of OpenAI is just one example of how AI engineers have become the biggest winners of this boom. Last summer, Meta offered up to $100 million to competing engineers and NVIDIA paid 900 million by an employee. Tender offers. The usual thing when you started to work in a startup is that you received a low salary and a lot of shares, but you had to wait for the IPO to be able to make cash. This made many employees rich only on paper, but without real liquidity. A tender offer allows employees to get paid much sooner, allowing them to sell stakes to private investors. They count in the Wall Street Journal That this mechanism, which was previously a one-time thing, has become a central piece in Silicon Valley achieves a double effect: in addition to turning employees into millionaires in advance and thus retaining them to stay in the company, it helps to consolidate stratospheric valuations, causing each new operation to set a higher reference price for OpenAI shares. The local impact. The rain of millions had an almost immediate consequence on the real estate market in San Franciscowhich is seeing prices rise even more. In February of this year the rents had increased by 14% compared to the same period in 2025 and the purchase prices of apartments and single-family homes rose by 12 and 23% respectively. At the same time, the sale of homes valued above $5 million has increased by 220%. The AI ​​gap. In the end, the AI ​​boom is not only redefining which companies rule Silicon Valley (and the world), but also who can afford to live there. The combination of exorbitant valuations, tender offers billionaires and a stressed real estate market is turning AI engineers into a new urban aristocracy that, in practice, is redefining what it means to have a “good salary.” The income that a few years ago guaranteed access to the best neighborhoods is no longer enough today. Image | Xataka with Gemini In Xataka | Companies are turning their workers who know how to use AI into “stars”: the new labor gap

Your employees want a piece of the pie

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Samsung has been one of the main beneficiaries of the crisis that has triggered the shortage of memory chips due to the high demand for these components for AI. In fact, in recent weeks, the South Korean manufacturer has set records of capitalization due to the strategic situation of the company as one of the main manufacturers of memories. However, despite the tailwinds that push its stock market price, Samsung faces a serious problem that cannot be resolved by manufacturing more chips: thousands of its workers have said enough and are threatening to stop the factories for 18 days. A scenario that only adds fuel to the fire of RAM problem that shakes the entire technology world. The workers are serious and the conflict it’s starting to get tense really. The labor conflict is not new, the workers unrest It has been brewing for some time within the South Korean company and has reached a point where, as published Reuters Even Samsung’s senior managers have had to come out publicly to ask for calm. What are the workers asking for? Samsung’s majority union in South Korea, which represents some 90,000 Samsung workers, demands two fundamental things: that the company remove the maximum cap on performance bonusesset at 50% of the annual salary, as applied in your competition SK Hynix. A mid-level employee at Samsung “might earn 90 million won a year and receive 45 million more in bonuses, but at Hynix, he would receive a bonus of 250 or 300 million won,” declared to the Financial Times Park Jun-young, a former employee in Samsung’s semiconductor division who now writes about the industry. Furthermore, they ask that the 15% of operating profit from the semiconductor division directly to the workers. This percentage would be equivalent to about 45 trillion won (30 billion dollars) distributed in extra bonuses for the staff. As and as highlighted the local environment The Chosun Dailythis figure means distributing among workers a bonus four times higher than the dividend that Samsung distributed in 2025 among its shareholders (11 trillion won). The company has counteroffered with a reduction of up to 13% of the division’s profit. On the other hand, the union demands a 7% salary increasecompared to the 6.2% that Samsung initially proposed. 93.1% of members who participated in the union vote in early April supported going on strike, reflecting the accumulated discomfort level. The company argues that eliminating the maximum cap on productivity bonuses could harm employees in less profitable divisions, but the union does not accept that argument and maintains its position. If the machines stop your pocket will notice it As and how I collected Reuterssome 40,000 affiliated workers gathered at the Pyeongtaek industrial complex, south of Seoul as a measure of pressure on the company’s management. According to the union organization that organized the concentration, only during that protest, the manufacture of chips fell 58% during the next night shift, and memory chip production down 18%. Samsung declined to comment on the impact. In the current stressed supply chain scenario, even a one-time stoppage can disrupt delivery times on a global scale, something especially sensitive for Samsung when competes directly with SK Hynix for HBM memory orders for artificial intelligence projects. The chairman of the board of directors, Shin Je-yoon, broke his silence on May 5 with a message posted on the company’s internal bulletin board. According to collect Korean Heraldthe manager recognized that the situation had generated concern among shareholders, clients and public opinion, and warned that an escalation could leave workers and management “without options.” The vice president and the executive president also issued a joint statement in which they agreed to negotiate with an “open attitude.” According to economic analyst media, a strike could generate more than 10 trillion won (about $6.8 billion) in operating losses, not counting reputational damage. The union has set the May 21 as start date of the strike, which would extend until June 7 if Samsung does not agree to its conditions. There are 18 days that could directly affect the global memory supply DRAM and NAND Flash. In Xataka | The RAM crisis is so big that even companies that had nothing to do with it are considering manufacturing them. Like Tesla Image | Wikimedia Commons (Choi Kwang-mo), IntelUnsplash (Liam Briese)

Meta plans to cut 10% of its workforce in May. Its employees have been surviving a “28-day hell” for weeks

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When last week the news was leaked that Meta was going to lay off 10% of its staff (again), the company had no choice but to make its decision public through a statement before I’m ready for it. The director of human resources, Janella Gale, acknowledged the leak and confirmed what many already feared: around 10% of the workforce will receive their dismissal notice. next May 20. The problem is that no one knows yet which profiles or departments will be fired. As the employees themselves said, this wait is precisely what is hurting them the most. There is a date marked on the calendar, there are figures on the table (about 7,800 positions eliminated plus another 6,000 that will be left uncovered), but there are no names. And in that void, thousands of employees have been trying to work normally for weeks without knowing if they will continue to occupy that table next month. Four weeks in limbo. “Welcome to the 28 days of hell.” This is how a Meta employee summed up the situation in an internal forum, and the expression quickly spread through the company’s internal communication channels. As and as detailed Business Insiderthat same uncertainty is breathed in the publications of the employees in the Blind app, where anguish, black humor and unanswered questions are mixed about what criteria will determine who stays and who leaves. In Blindan employee asked how to find motivation to work during the next few weeks knowing that layoffs are a fact and we can only wait for the names to be given to make them effective. One response summed up the general mood: “I’m getting motivated to do things that I can put on my resume for my next job,” said a Meta employee. In Meta’s own internal forums, others claimed to be focused on demonstrating results quickly, before D-day arrives, in an attempt desperate to avoid dismissal. A state of anxiety that has already lasted since 2022. For many Meta workers, this round of layoffs is not an isolated surprise. Since 2022, the company has gone through several waves of cuts, and that has left its mark on the employees who kept their jobs when thousands (hundreds of thousands, actually) of colleagues were falling into the different rounds of dismissal that Meta has applied since 2022. One employee admitted to feeling more anguish about the possibility of surviving layoffs than about being fired, because those who stay know that they will have to take on a greater workload in an increasingly pressured company. This phenomenon, called survivor syndrome, It is more common than it seems and is fueled by that uncertainty of someone who faces a situation that they know and that they know will get worse, and that perhaps they will fall into the next round of layoffs. In fact, according to some comments in that application, some employees admit to having mentally disconnected from work, and there are even those who are considering maneuvering to be included on the layoff list and thus collect compensation. AI as a background to the cut. Another factor that contributes to undermining the morale of employees who must deal with “their 28-day hell” is that, in reality, these dismissals do not occur because they are doing their job poorly or because of the company’s financial problems, but rather because of a strategic bet that puts the AI as an absolute priority for the company. If there is only one dollar to spend, that dollar will be invested in AI. “We are doing this as part of our continuous effort to manage the company more efficiently and to compensate for the other investments we are making,” said Meta’s human resources manager in her statement. Goal plans to allocate between $115 billion and $135 billion in capital investment this year alone, double the capital that he destined in 2024 to this end, with artificial intelligence as the main destination of money. Mark Zuckerberg has been making it clear for months that AI is the absolute priority of the company, which leaves positions that are not aligned with the development of that technology in an increasingly complicated position. What awaits those who are fired. Meta cuts come at the same time as Microsoft announces early retirements volunteers for the first time in its 51-year history. This new strategy is raising alarm bells about whether AI-powered automation is starting to cause a structural labor crisis in the technology sector. According to the company’s statement, Meta employees who finally receive their dismissal letter on May 20 will receive compensation of 16 weeks of base salary plus two additional weeks for each year worked in the company. “We will also cover the cost of COBRA health insurance for US employees and their families for 18 months. Packages outside the United States will be similar, but will vary by country, as will local deadlines and processes,” states the internal Meta statement signed by Gale. In Xataka | “They blame AI for layoffs they would do anyway”: Sam Altman confirms that AI has been used as an excuse to lay off Image | Unsplash (Mariia Shalabaieva, Arif Riyanto)

The NYT published the story of the AI ​​entrepreneur who has a turnover of 1.8 billion with two employees. Forgot to mention a few things

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On April 2, The New York Times public a profile of Matthew Gallagher, a 41-year-old entrepreneur from Los Angeles who with $20,000, the help of his brother and a dozen AI tools managed to create MEDVi. This telemedicine startup sells GLP-1 weight loss drugs and in 2025 had a turnover of $401 million and projects to reach $1.8 billion in 2026. The story went viral and seemed to show that the AI ​​revolution can make you rich if you set up your own sole proprietorship (or almost), but in reality the NYT article left without mentioning important details and disturbing aspects of this business success. 800 fake doctors. In creating MEDVi, Gallaguer created more than 800 Facebook pages that posed as the profiles of individual doctors. Dr. Daniel Foster, Dr. Jacob L. Chandler or Dr. Alistair Whitmore do not exist: they are profiles created by AI, with photos generated with AI, and which precisely serve as support for women between 35 and 55 years old on Facebook who want to lose weight to see these profiles. The NYT article itself commented that photos with models generated by AI appeared on the MEDVi website and that some advertisements They were “AI Slop”. The media talks about me or not really. The company’s official website also showed logos of Bloomberg or The Times as if they had published articles about it when in reality it had barely advertised in said media and then could show that it had appeared in said media. What the article does not mention is the scale of this Facebook profiling operation. The FDA warns. On February 20, 2026, the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) sent a warning letter (#721455) which was in fact part of a set of similar letters sent to 30 telemedicine companies. This type of letter is not a formal accusation, but rather an “informal and advisory” communication. The reason for the letter to MEDVi were two specific problems on its website. First, the images of the products showed the label “MEDVi”, which in American regulations implies that the company is the manufacturer of these medications, when in reality it is just an intermediary that orders them from external pharmacies. Second, phrases such as “same active ingredient as Wegovy® and Ozempic®” led one to believe that MEDVi’s compounded products had received FDA approval or evaluation, when compounded medications do not go through that process. The NYT did not mention the FDA letter. Medications with uncertain (or no) effectiveness. Part of MEDVi business includes oral compound tirzepatidea product that does not exist in an FDA-approved form. This company falsely presented it as a safe and effective GLP-1 drug for weight loss, even though there is no regulatory-approved variant. The only approved oral GLP-1 requires an absorption enhancer and very controlled administration conditions: MEDVi was selling something that probably did nothing, and in fact laboratories like Lilly have warned of these types of products and have taken legal action to prohibit its sale. A group of people already sued several telemedicine companies for selling “snake oil” as if oral tirzepatide were magic when nothing has been proven. Again, there was no data on this in the NYT article. 1.6 million medical records leaked. MEDVi outsources its medical infrastructure to OpenLoop Health, which the NYT article mentions as “managing doctors, pharmacies, shipping and regulatory compliance.” In January 2026, a cybercriminal managed to access OpenLoop systems and claimed to have obtained the records of some 1.6 million patients including names, contact information, dates of birth and medical information. OpenLoop reported of the intrusion in March 2026 and confirmed that at least 68,000 were affected in the state of Texas alone. If you want clients, the key is spam. MEDVi too has been sued in California for violating this state’s anti-spam laws. According to that lawsuit, MEDVi used an affiliate marketing technique that sent spam using falsified information, spoofed domains, and shipping addresses designed to avoid spam filters. Gallagher noted in The New York Times that “a total of $20,000 was spent on the software and the first month of marketing,” and it is not clear how much of the initial growth was due to practices that are now part of that new legal process. A success story with a dangerous background. The story that NYT tells us is fascinating and seems to effectively point to that future in which a person will be able to set up a successful business with the help of AI. However, in this case the success achieved is overshadowed by the way in which AI was used and the way in which Gallaguer presented his business. The NYT seems to have verified that the company actually earned $401 million in 2025. The question that remains unanswered is what part of that income came from people who bought a drug that probably doesn’t work, promoted by doctors who don’t exist, through an infrastructure that ended up leaking their medical data. Image | MEDVi In Xataka | We believed that GLP-1 drugs were only going to change obesity. They just turned upside down how we treat addictions

SpaceX is now a company in the railway sector and it is very bad news for its employees

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For some people it will be ingenuity, for others a very hard face, but the point is that SpaceX has found a way to avoid lawsuits and strikes by its workers when obtaining the name of air transport company. This means that it is regulated under the Railway Labor Law, with all the benefits that it entails within US legislation. The news. On March 13, the official resolution was made public by which SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space agency, is now considered a company in the railway sector in the United States. This means that your activity is no longer subject to the supervision of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)which is typically responsible for protecting the labor rights of private sector workers. The layoffs that started it all. In January 2024, the NLRB put a lawsuit against SpaceX on the tableafter the company illegally fired 8 employees. The lawsuit requested reinstatement of the employees, back pay, and a letter of apology to each of them. Given this situation, SpaceX responded with another lawsuit to the NLRBalleging that the procedure being carried out was unconstitutional. Rockets have the same legal treatment as cargo planes. An ace up your sleeve. According to Elon Musk’s company, the NLRB should not be able to act against a company that is dedicated to transportation. He added that One of its main missions is the transport of humans and goods to the International Space Station.. In many cases, these jobs are carried out for NASA, so they would also be providing a service to the Government. For all this, they requested to be covered under the Railway Labor Law. A plan that suits many. In recent years, SpaceX, as well as other Elon Musk companies, have been the subject of complaints from a multitude of dissatisfied employees, either due to their personal situation or due to bad practices carried out in the company. In the case of Neuralink, for example, Very bad practice towards laboratory animals was reported. But returning to SpaceX, the increasing volume of complaints could put the company’s work pace at risk. This, logically, would harm its managers, but also the companies that benefit from its services. The entire US space program would probably collapse. For all this, although it seemed difficult, in the end Elon Musk’s company has had a resolution in favor of its new name. Immune to strikes. One of the peculiarities of railroad companies in the United States is that they benefit from special state protection. Since minimum transport services must be guaranteed, strikes and other similar activities that would normally slow down the normal pace of work are closely controlled. The NLRB no longer rules. Another of those special protections for railroad companies is that the NLRB no longer has power over them. Therefore, dismissed employees cannot resort to it to report their situation. Instead, the company is governed by the rules of the National Mediation Boardmuch more lax in the mediation of labor disputes. It is true that employees can request strikes, but to do so they must undergo a long and tedious process that often causes them to change their decision. And now what? With this new name, SpaceX has even more power and freedom than before. If measures are carried out that involve malpractice towards employees, it is difficult for their complaints to come to fruition legally. This gives them a lot of leeway and greatly speeds up their protocols. Other curious legal victories. It is not the first time that SpaceX has obtained an unexpected legal name. Last year, for example, The Starbase base was given the name of cityso that all employees who live nearby would also become inhabitants. This, far from changing a few patterns, also gave SpaceX more freedom when maneuvering in the areas surrounding its base. As with railway legislation, what may seem like a small name change can change everything. Image | Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia Commons) |SpaceX In Xataka | SpaceX is preparing the largest IPO in history: the fact that it is doing so right now is no coincidence

Your employees pay that bill every morning

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For decades, commuting to work in large Spanish cities had a clear logic: workers lived on the outskirts of large cities and They traveled every morning towards the center to their jobs. It was a fairly stable urban model, reinforced by transportation networks designed to take workers to the large office districts of the urban area. However, in recent years this pattern has been changing as the price of land in the center has skyrocketed and companies have also had to move to the periphery. As and as it portrays The Countrythe problem is that cities are not designed to move from periphery to periphery, and that movement has become in a daily mousetrap for millions of employees. Not even the companies can bear the prices of the center. In recent years, many companies have chosen to move their offices to peripheral areas where land is cheaper and there is space to build. large office complexes. This movement has made it possible to build huge business campuses that would be unviable in the urban centers of large cities with high demand for land such as Madrid or Barcelona. In Madrid, the north of the city has become one of the main destinations for this type of projects. An example is the Telephone Districtlocated in Las Tablas, which occupies about 22 hectares and concentrates more than 12,000 workers in a single business complex. The records of the Residence-Work Mobility Atlas of the Community of Madrid show that districts such as Fuencarral-El Pardo (where the Telefónica District is located) are already among the areas with the highest concentration of employment in the region. Barcelona experienced a similar process with the development of 22@ technological district in Poblenou, where numerous technology companies and corporate headquarters have been setting up shop in the last two decades. The transformation of this old industrial neighborhood created a new employment center outside the historic center of the city. Employment is moving, but so are prices. The problem with this migration of companies to the periphery of urban centers is that when thousands of workers begin to concentrate in a specific area, the real estate market usually reacts quickly. Proximity to work centers increases the value of nearby neighborhoods, which ends up raising rental and housing prices. This increase, in turn, forces employees to move to municipalities even further away from the city center and the offices where they work. The result is a constant increase in daily trips within the metropolitan area. In Madrid this phenomenon is reflected in the labor mobility figures. According to the recorded data According to the Mobility Atlas of the Community of Madrid, every day 1.2 million people enter the capital from other municipalities to work, compared to the 790,000 who did so in 2016. Something similar is happening in the city of Barcelona, which after the growth of 22@ has attracted workers from numerous municipalities in the metropolitan area, congesting the northern and southern access roads and the city’s ring roads due to the traffic generated by these employees at peak times, such as and how collect traffic congestion report of Inrix of 2025. Transportation takes you to the center, not to the periphery. All these congestion problems have their origin in the fact that the large transport infrastructures (metros, trams, Cercanías, bus lines, etc.) of the large Spanish cities have been designed for decades with a radial structure. They were planned to connect the peripheral neighborhoods with the city center, which was where most of the employment was concentrated. When new business centers began to grow outside the center, that structure began to show its limitations. Many workers no longer need to go to the urban area, but rather travel between peripheral areas that are not directly connected by public transport. This requires long journeys or several transfers, something that often makes the car faster. Even if it means getting stuck every day on the way to work. Furthermore, public transportation in many cities has become a lottery with constant delays and breakdownswhich generates uncertainty when considering alternatives to the private car. The price: hundreds of hours lost. The increase in long trips to work and dependence on the car is clearly reflected in traffic data. According to the TomTom Traffic IndexMadrid registered an average congestion level of 38% in 2025, which is 3.6 percentage points more than the previous year. That level of traffic means that traveling 10 kilometers during rush hour can take about 34 and a half minutes, with average speeds close to 17.5 km/h. The report also estimates that Madrid drivers lose around 98 hours a year in traffic jams during rush hour. When daily journeys are long, the accumulated time can multiply and reach up to 500 hours per year per person lost in traffic jams. Barcelona faces a similar situationwith a level of congestion in its urban center and access roads of 41.1%, which is one of the highest figures in Europe. In Xataka | The worst traffic jam in history: two weeks, more than 100 kilometers and thousands of cars detained in China Image | Unsplash (Kathy)

In 1985 the most valuable company in the world had 400,000 employees. In 2026 the most valuable company in the world will have 40,000 employees

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36,000 employees. Is the approximate number of the template of what, today, is the most valuable company in the world: NVIDIA. It may seem like a lot of employees, but the figure takes on another dimension when we compare it to what was the most valuable company in the world, IBM, which once had a whopping 400,000 employees on its payroll in 1985. More inhabitants than many cities The IBM of the 80s needed a veritable army of employees to function. It reached its peak in 1985, with a total of 405,000 employees hired all over the world, a figure that exceeds the population of cities such as Alicante, Bilbao or Córdoba. Currently, large technology companies have enormous staff, but all of them are very far from what IBM was (except for Amazon which due to its global retail business, has a much larger staff). According to bullfincher datathis is the number of employees of the big tech: Alphabet (Google): 190,000 Microsoft: 228,000 Apple: 166,000 Goal: 78,000 NVIDIA: 36,000 The case of NVIDIA draws attention, which with only 36,000 employees stands out as the most valuable company of the moment. Right now its market capitalization is 4 trillion dollarsalthough reached 5 billion at the end of last year. And what about the money? But let’s get to the important thing: How much money did IBM generate with that workforce? They count in The Chip Letter that, in 1985, IBM brought in 50,000 million dollars, which adjusted for inflation it would be about 150 billion dollars. Let’s see how it looks compared to what big technology companies entered in 2025: Alphabet: 402.8 billion Microsoft: 281.7 billion Apple: 416,000 million Goal: 200,000 million NVIDIA: 130 billion (2024) IBM was a true giant in its time, but even adjusting for inflation, its income pales compared to what big technology companies earn today. The only exception is NVIDIA, which has not yet reported its results for 2025, so the figure is that of 2024. Still, if we compare the volume of employees, NVIDIA makes each employee much more profitable. We talk about $3.61 million per employee compared to $370,000 per employee in the case of IBM, almost ten times more profitable. Productivity has skyrocketed How have companies managed to maximize profitability per employee? The key is in digitalization and how it has boosted productivity. Already in 2013 there was talk that technology had made Productivity will increase by 480% since the 70s. If we go to the specific case of IBM and NVIDIA, the first was mainly dedicated to the manufacture of mainframe computers or mainframesa process that in itself was much more laborious, at a time when manufacturing more meant having more employees on production lines. NVIDIA is a company fablessmeaning that those who manufacture their GPUs are other companies like TSMC, and they also do it with much faster and more efficient automated processes. This leaves its 36,000 employees “free” to focus on chip design and architecture, allowing them to scale faster and with much less labor. However, there is something in which no technology company manages to surpass what IBM once was: its degree of transversal dominance. He kept around the 70% market share mainframes, But it was also a leader in minicomputers, microcomputers and the software that accompanied them, from databases to compilers. Image | Apple (edited with Gemini) In Xataka | Company CEOs say AI is saving them a day of work a week. Employees say otherwise

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